Mad Love
by Harper008
Summary: Phantom Limb. Phantom Love.


Author's Note; This is what you get when you mix a psychology/neuroscience major with Olivia, Elliot, Fan fiction, and the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. That and the fact that love makes you crazy – enjoy.

**Mad Love.**

He looked like someone that she knew.

His eyes were blue and his hair was dark and he was wearing a long black coat that he had buttoned all the way up. He looked like something that she knew, he looked like someone that she should know and she felt like this person was some phantom limb, hanging around and making her feel things that she didn't really feel, because she didn't know him.

But, he looked like someone that she knew.

He sat down in the chair next to her bed and his eyes were still blue and his hair was still brown and she still didn't know him.

"I'm feel so, responsible." He was apologizing, but she didn't know why, because she didn't know him. He was crying and his eyes were turning red, but she kept remembering that they had been blue, which was good, because she didn't know him and she thought that she should remember the strangers who came in and out of the room.

Earlier there had been a doctor with brown hair and brown eyes and a white coat. He told her something but she didn't remember what and she didn't care now because she didn't remember.

A bad memory is good because you can learn everything over and over again, you can learn and experience and live things over and over again and fall in love with the simple things in life because they never prove boring.

That wasn't a memory, that was a thought.

A hypothesis.

He stayed in his coat, his buttoned up coat that had a badge hanging off of the side and she wondered why he was there, sitting in the corner of the room and crying, making his blue eyes outlined in red and she wondered why he was there with her.

She felt like there was something she should be doing or saying, but she couldn't remember what, she could only feel it's loss and if she remembered how to be scared that would have scared her.

She can feel her head because feeling is not so much a memory as much as a sensation. Her whole life, without her knowing it, has been transformed into a sensation.

"It should have been me." She felt that he wasn't looking at her, but looking at the floor, and she was thankful for that because she didn't want a stranger's eyes seeing her like this – seeing her bandaged and bruised, scraped and scarred and lying still in a hospital bed.

At least she thought it was a hospital, and she thought there were scars, she couldn't feel them enough to recognize their existence. She could feel inside of her though, and she felt like a plastic toy with a hollowed torso and she wondered where her heart went, because she didn't remember it.

She felt a loss and that made her aware of the fact that there had once been something there.

Phantom limb. Phantom love.

He was still talking, but his blue eyes weren't looking at her.

She knew they were blue because she saw them when he came in and looked to her and she didn't remember either action taking place, him looking at her or him coming in - but she felt him.

-

They said that he should talk to somebody, that that could help him and he didn't know if it could really help him or if these nameless faces were really trying to help him.

He couldn't see them anymore, blurs and blobs of what used to be people, all suspended in time, all identified by the drone tone of their voices.

To be blind to the world but to still feel it, to let your memories play before your eyes and glide slowly from sculpted forms to shapes, that is what he saw and couldn't understand.

He laughed when he thought that he had ever understood.

Love and loss and rules and games and ways to do things.

He was resentful because she wanted to play by the rules and take things slow and now she was a shell of his memories, she was lost to him and he was afraid to see her because he couldn't let her not know him. The one thing that he had ever know, that he had ever been able to identify, and he knew that if he saw her – he would really see her, see her heart and eyes and soul and he wouldn't see her like everyone else, like the blurred monotony that everyone else evolved into – but he wanted her to remember.

He didn't want to meet her, he knew her and he didn't want to go to her, with her stolen past and force himself to meet her and her meet him because he already knew her.

He didn't want to be a memory, but he wanted recognition all the same. He knew that he loved her and she used to love him and he would make her love him and nothing else mattered beyond that because if you fall in love with someone once you can do it over and over and over again – especially if you don't remember.

He could make her love him over and over and over again and she wouldn't remember and he could make it better every time and he could love each part of her more each time than he did before and he could ignore the fact that the thought of doing that was taking away more of him than had already been stolen.

He would be able to see her - he knew that he would be able to see her.

-

"What happened?" She was just an outline of a person, a squiggled line drawn to fit the picture that he'd made of his life. He didn't like that she wasn't as personal, but he liked that she gave him his space and let him talk and he would come and sit and ramble and she would listen.

She would never tell him what to do and he would never feel like he was crazy, because he wasn't.

This whole thing had made him crazy, losing her, finding her transformed into a book with no words, into a large book with blank pages that were once written in gold – he couldn't let himself keep finding nothing where she used to be.

"I saw them take her down first, we were facing the wrong window, and the bullet grazed the back of her head, and she just went down." He didn't remember the rest because he had gone down next, in a pile of pieces next to her. And he didn't want to remember what she looked like, so he closed his eyes and hoped that he could turn off the pictures in his mind like he had been turned off to those in real life.

"Did you care about her?" Her questions were personal, but distant, and he was thankful for that because it let him be the one attached to this, and not her. She wasn't taking this on for him, this woman that they said he should talk to because it would help him get over watching Olivia fall to the ground, watch her fall to pieces and he knew that she would never be put back together again.

He wondered why this woman couldn't tell by looking at him. He wondered why she couldn't look at him, broken and mangled and part of what he was and he wondered how she couldn't know that he loved her, that he breathed for her and with her and because of her and he wanted to see her to know that she was okay, but he couldn't bear to see her as the outline of a stranger.

He was scared that they would become symptoms.

Elliot Stabler; damaged occipital cortex with visual distortion.

Olivia Benson; damaged limbic system with resulting memory loss.

They were not blank slates yet – a memory did not constitute a person, it held onto the person, but it did not make them one. And, as far as he was concerned, you did not need to see when everything was dark.

He wanted to take solace in the fact that memory did not negate feeling, and he could still have a place there somewhere, whether or not she remember how to get to it was not the problem, whether or not it existed was, rather. The brain is a massive region of folds and bends and secret compartments and he wanted to be foolish enough to think that he was stuck somewhere in there.

Stupid Fool.

"I can't go to her because I can't see everything that I used to see in color now in a black and white outline," Elliot cleared his throat when he finished and he wished that he wasn't so scared of not seeing her.

"I'm sorry." He didn't know why she was apologizing, but he liked it because it seemed appropriate.

It seemed like someone should be apologizing for everything that he had lost.

-

He was there again today and she knew that it was again because the chair in the corner of her room had dents in it that fit his body when he slid down, it fit his frame – his dark frame and dark coat and blue eyes and she wanted to know why she felt like he was everything that she used to be conscious of.

She was burning with the absence of something that she was unconscious of and she could not reconcile it with anything.

He looked lost and found and she wondered if he knew her or if he was just walking around, visiting all the other ghosts on the floor; the has beens and could be's and blank forms of people and memories and lives.

If you didn't remember anyone, could you still be a person?

This man had said that she still was, he said that a memory did not make a person; that a soul and a spirit made a person and a memory did not. He said it with his hands over his mouth and he sounded full of conviction, but she didn't remember how to believe.

"If you never see someone again can you still love them?" He asked her and she would have thought that he was asking her if she never saw someone again because she forgot them, would she still love them, but she didn't remember how to think about it in that way and she didn't know what to say to him and she didn't remember how to love someone, but she felt the absence of having loved someone.

"If you remember them," Olivia replied.

"What if you feel them?" The man got up and was pacing back and forth and if she remembered how to be taken over this is what it would have felt like.

"Why are you wearing a coat?" She looked at him and he looked beyond her and he unbuttoned his coat, revealing a hospital gown underneath that matched her own.

"I want to go to her and make her remember and she won't remember me in a hospital gown without vision." If she remembered how to feel empathy, that's what she would have called the pain inside of her.

"Olivia, are you ready for lunch?" A nurse called from the doorway of her room and Elliot backed up until he felt the wall behind him.

He thought she was a therapist, someone to talk to about all of this – they had directed him here, to her room, they brought her to him but he couldn't see her and he couldn't feel her and he wondered who he was – he was loosing his senses right and left and he didn't want to let anything else fall away from him, but he couldn't breath because he was so close to everything he wanted to be with.

He squinted his broken eyes to try to see her, but she was nothing more than an outline of what she once was – a squiggled line and he knew that she had once been filled with vibrant color.

If Olivia could remember what tears were, that's what she would have named the emotion coming from the man's eyes.

"Who am I?" He ran to her, through the objects between them and he tripped over his coat that he had let fall to the floor and he kneeled beside her bed and he reached for her and he tried to force her to remember his touch and his feeling and his life – their life.

If he could have seen her eyes, he would have seen that they were empty.

"Olivia, it's me, you know me, I know you do. Feel me." He held his hands out palms up and she looked to him hesitantly before running her fingers over his palms and his arms, up to his chest and face and absent eyes.

If she remembered what desire was called, that's what she would have named the burning inside of her.

"Remember, Liv." She was confused because she did not know who Liv was, she was Olivia Benson, room 412, and she only knew that because it said it on her bracelet.

He wanted to see her, but he was scared because he thought that even if he had his sight he would not recognize her.

Mad Love.

Phantom Love.

He had been amputated from her, and she from him.

He wondered if they could still love each other, and she wondered if they ever loved each other.

"I should be sorry." His tears were falling onto her and she felt like she should be sorry for this because this man, this stranger, was coming undone in her room today after he had been there so many times before.

She felt his ghost.

"Remember me," he wanted to see if this really was every dream that he had ever let roll through his mind, that had kept him up at nite and taught him how to feel.

"You can love someone without ever seeing them again." She answered his question from earlier, the last thing she remembered as she felt it falling from her broken memory.

Two broken pieces made one jagged whole.

Mad Love.

-

finished.


End file.
